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How to Measure for Wallpaper

So you’ve taken the brave step and decided on using wallpaper to give your room a fabulous new look - excellent! But how much wallpaper do you actually need to order?

As every room is different, there’s no hard and fast rule as to how many rolls you’re going to need. And obviously, if you are only doing a feature wall you’ll surely need less than if you are going to paper all four walls.

It’s actually rather simple to figure out how much wallpaper you’ll need, by using our handy wallpaper roll calculator that’s on every one of our products. Happily, we’ve done some of the hard work for you in terms of calculating the repeat, which relates to how many times the full pattern is repeated over the length of the roll. Sounds complicated, but don’t worry – it’s all incorporated into the calculator!

What you will need to know, however, is the length and width of your walls in centimetres.

Using a tape measure (and possibly someone else to assist with holding one end if your room is large), you’ll want to measure the length and width of each wall to the nearest centimetre. Even if there are doors or windows that won’t be wallpapered, it’s often easier to ignore these in your measurements as this way, you will end up ordering slightly more than you need.

Why order more than you need? Well, wallpapers are often manufactured in batches. And while here at Graham & Brown, we’ll make sure that every roll you order is from the same manufacturing batch, if you need to order more, finding wallpaper from the exact same batch may prove difficult. As the colours and patterns may vary ever so slightly between batches, it’s always better to order a bit too much rather than order too little. Having extra will also give you a little room for error so you’ll always want to calculate an additional 10% of wastage into your measurements.

Remember that if you have unopened rolls of wallpaper that haven’t been used, you can always return them free of charge. And if you are feeling creative, you can always use any offcuts in other areas of your home. Check out some ideas here!

Once you have the measurements of the wall, enter the width and height into the roll calculator. This will tell you how many rolls you’ll need for each wall and will incorporate both the repeat in the measurement as well as wastage. Repeat this for each wall in the room and simply add the amount of rolls together to see how much wallpaper you need to order.